I was thumbing through a copy of Profit Magazine and I came across a great article on a hot trend for 2012 – Recommerce. Recommerce is really just bringing the garage sale junkie out in all of us. We want our old stuff to be worth something. We’ve been conditioned steadily by the auto industry, video stores and video game retailers etc… But the recommerce trend is bringing it all full circle and we now want everything to have a resale value.
There are three + factors driving this trend a) a tight economy b) low savings rates c) the green movement and one more common sense. Let’s face it, we consume too much. The E.U, U.S. and China represent 55.4% of the world’s entire gross domestic product. With more people being added to the planet by the minute, we will have to learn to do more with less, its just simple math. We have too much stuff. When I flip on A&E and watch Barry, Jarrod and the rest of the cast on Storage Wars buying abandoned storage units for hidden treasures that can be resold, I realize that we are spending too much on things we don’t need.
If this recommerce trend is for real, how long will it be before we have two sets of prices the next time we walk into a major retailer – brand new and slightly depreciated (lightly worn)? It’s a well-known fact that most retailers work on the new styles, new trends etc… so it might take a while for this to take shape. And there will always be fears of product cannibalization – the slightly worn jeans stealing sales from the hot new jeans. But I am not proposing anything all that revolutionary; I just think that retailers will have to change with the times.
Recommerce is more than a hot new trend; it’s becoming an everyday reality. Consumers who don’t have as money as they used to and are more eco-conscious are demanding more and more that the products they buy have some type of resale value attached to the price.
